The Wing-Friends and Other Books

In Blogger's slideshows images are greatly reduced, so lose much of their impact. And captions added to them in Picasa Albums vanish, so the images shown above are: the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, Earth, Earth with New Zealand circled, New Zealand, Auckland & the Hauraki Gulf, Waiheke Island, some native NZ forest, a Fantail and chicks, various doves, etc.

(If you want to see the first ten images in their original size, they are in a posting made on the 24th of November 2011.)

My book The Wing-Friends is an imaginative tale of a small brave boy, a magical adventure, a magnificent Pegasus and the wonderful Kingdom of the Pegasi. It has been given very good reviews, and virtually every reader on Goodreads has so far awarded it five stars. It is available here. Some of my other writings are available as e-books, such as The Lower Deck, which is an over-the-top take on Waiheke happenings--sort of.

Saturday, 3 September 2016

KEEP THE MONARCHY!

A poll has just been published which appears to say that New Zealanders want to ditch the monarchy

God forbid! We would get someone like our damned politicians. Better to have someone born to the job, trained for it, not political in the slightest degree, someone with a broad world view and experience of all matters, and remote enough to be independent and seen to be independent. Someone in the job for life, not someone voted in at enormous expense of money and argy-bargy every few years. Someone not in the least open to even a hint of political interference or bias. All that is the black blot on America's ridiculous system of so-called government.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

But as the article shows, the 'poll' was loaded, the question put was not neutral, and the figures were jiggered to give the republican outfit that paid for it the answer it wanted.

And to say that the Queen is a British Monarch, although true, is also a lie, because she is a citizen of every country in which she is monarch, which includes New Zealand. She is British, Canadian, Australian, a New Zealander, etc., etc. That underlines how loaded the question was. It was, to put it bluntly, a lie looking for a lie in answer.

The uninformed people who want to dump the monarchy do not understand its fundamental importance. In New Zealand law, for example, one of the most important statutes is the Imperial Laws Application Act 1988, which sets into modern New Zealand law the great laws enacted by royalty, stretching all the way back to the update in 1297 by King Edward I of Magna Carta. And section 29 of that update, which is the section enshrined in the Imperial Laws Application Act 1988, is a great promise: 'we shall defer or deny to no man either justice or right.' It is the right of all those in New Zealand to claim that promise when confronted by official wrongdoing.

Section 29 in full is the fundamental of all the rights and freedom we enjoy in New Zealand, and in all countries where Queen Elizabeth II is head of state: 'NO freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right.' [disseised means deprived of, have taken away]

We owe a great debt to monarchy, a debt of centuries of rights and freedoms, and a debt to a system that serves us superbly well. Ditching it out of ignorance and replacing it system riddled and raddled with politics would be grossly stupid.